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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION
AND VISUAL CULTURE

James Bond
Uncovered

Edited by
Jeremy Strong
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of
text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its
focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a
vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as video-
games, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint
media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expan-
sive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a
larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are
not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive
plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropria-
tions, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially wel-
comes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation
and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that
focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adapta-
tion as connected to various forms of visual culture.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654
 Jeremy Strong
Editor

James Bond
Uncovered
Editor
Jeremy Strong
Chelmsford, UK

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-76122-0    ISBN 978-3-319-76123-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76123-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939245

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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Cover illustration: Chloe Johnson / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

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Publishing AG part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Rebecca, with love
 Acknowledgements

A version of ‘James Bond: International Man of Gastronomy’ was pub-

lished in the Journal of European Popular Culture (4.2) in 2014. It appears
here by kind permission of the publishers, Intellect.

vii
 Contents

Introduction   1
Jeremy Strong

 ou Only Live Twice: A Tale of Two Bonds  23

Y
Graham Holderness

J ames Bond’s Forgotten Beginnings: Television Adaptations  41

Jonathan Bignell

J ames Bond: International Man of Gastronomy?  61

Jeremy Strong

Bond Resounding  87
Jonathan Stockdale

 reaking Bond’s Balls: A Feminist Re-Reading Ian Fleming 107

B
Imelda Whelehan

Mess and Meta-Mess: Casino Royale (1967) 127

I. Q. Hunter

ix
x Contents

 ive and Let Die: The Tarot as Other in the 007 Universe 143
L
Joyce Goggin

Licence to Replicate: Never Say Never Again (1983) as 007’s

Lesson in Adaptation Studies 163
Wieland Schwanebeck

 hailand, Highland and Secret Island: Landscape and Power

T
in Bond Films 185
Tim Waterman

J ames Bond and the End of Empire 203

James Chapman

 he Resilient Agent: James Bond, ‘Nostalgic Geopolitics’

T
and Skyfall 223
Klaus Dodds

 he Evolution of M in the Latest Bond Franchise Instalments:

T
Skyfall and Spectre 243
Lucinda Hobbs

J ames Bond: The Game 265

Florian Stephens

Index 291
 Notes on Contributors

Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of

Reading, UK. His work includes articles on film and television secret
agents in Media History, Symbolism, and in the collection British Science
Fiction Film and Television. His writing about adaptation includes work
on The Time Machine and The Handmaid’s Tale. He is the author or edi-
tor of several books about the history of British and American television
drama.
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of
Leicester, UK, and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television. He specialises in the history of British cinema and television,
and his work includes Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James
Bond Films (1999; 2nd edn 2007), Past and Present: National Identity
and the British Historical Film (2005), Inside the Tardis: A Cultural
History of 'Doctor Who' (2006; 2nd edn 2013) and Swashbucklers: The
Costume Adventure Series (2015).
Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University
of London and has written about the popular geopolitics of spies, vigilan-
tes and assassins such as James Bond and Jason Bourne. He is the author
of a number of books including Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction
(2014) and a co-written book on International Politics and Film (2014).
Joyce Goggin is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she also teaches film and media studies.

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

She has published widely on gambling and finance in literature, painting,

comic books, film, TV and computer games. She is currently researching
and writing on casino culture, Las Vegasization and public debt, gamifica-
tion and the entertainment industries. She has recently been appointed a
co-editor of SAGE Publications’ journal Television and New Media, and is
one of the editors of a forthcoming anthology entitled The Aesthetics and
Affects of Cuteness. Her most recent articles include, ‘Is It True Blondes
Have More Fun?’ Mad Men, and the Mechanics of Serialization’,
Serialization and Popular Culture, and ‘Like Pocahontas on Drugs:
Avatar and Adaptation’, in a special issue of Interfaces: Image, Text,
Language, on expanding adaptations. Forthcoming articles include
‘Opening Shots and Loose Slots’, to be published in a special issue of
Screen entitled ‘Opening Pages, Opening Shots’, and another entitled
‘The Perils of Fictional Credit: Gambling Debts and Borrowed Money’
about finance, gambling and shopping in Frances Burney’s Cecilia, to be
published in Hard Cash, a collection of essays on finance and culture.
Lucinda Hobbs is a research student in the Centre for Adaptations at De
Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She is currently working on her Ph.D.
on ‘Adapting the Role of M in the James Bond Franchise’, having com-
pleted an MA in Adaptation Studies on ‘Race and Prejudice’ with a dis-
sertation on ‘Whiteness as Blackness in Moby Dick’ at De Montfort
University in 2013. Her background is in commissioning and project
managing titles on English Language and English Literature lists for lead-
ing educational publishers, having trained as an editor and commissioner
at Oxford University Press. She is also editorial administrator of the A-level
magazine, The English Review.
Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of
Hertfordshire, and has also taught at the Universities of Oxford, Swansea
and Roehampton in the UK. Most of his 40 published books focus on
Shakespeare, with particular interests in Shakespeare’s history plays,
Shakespeare and the media, Shakespeare editing, Shakespeare and con-
temporary culture, and transnational Shakespeare. Recent publications
include Shakespeare in Venice (2009) and the innovative new biography
Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (2011). Influential publications include:
D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (1982); The Shakespeare Myth
(1988); Shakespeare: The Histories (2000); and the trilogy Cultural
Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001), Visual Shakespeare:
Essays in Film and Television (2002) and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and
 Notes on Contributors 
   xiii

the Word (2003). He is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The
Prince of Denmark was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft
received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ
was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, and by Royal Shakespeare
Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
I.Q. Hunter is Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University,
Leicester, UK, and author of British Trash Cinema (2013). He has pub-
lished widely on cult film, adaptation and British cinema, and has edited
numerous books, including British Science Fiction Cinema (1999) and
British Comedy Cinema (2012).
Wieland Schwanebeck is Research Assistant and Chair of English
Literary Studies at Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Wieland
gained his degree at Dresden in 2009, and he has been working and teach-
ing there ever since. His fields of interest include gender and masculinities
studies, British film history, narratology and Alfred Hitchcock. He fin-
ished his Ph.D. project on the adaptable masculinities of Patricia
Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in 2013. His publications include a
study of the German campus novel (Annäherungsversuche, 2012), two
volumes on impostors, the forthcoming Metzler Handbook of Masculinities
Studies (co-edited with Stefan Horlacher and Bettina Schötz), and numer-
ous articles and reviews on topics such as genre, signature, adaptation,
contemporary British fiction, and the body politic, which have appeared in
journals such as Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly and Men and
Masculinities. He is currently editing a book on Alfred Hitchcock (tenta-
tively entitled Sabotaging ‘Hitchcock’).
Florian Stephens is Senior Lecturer in Digital Animation at the
University of West London, where he is also Course Leader for the BA
(Hons) Visual Effects. Starting his career as a sculptor, Florian has gone
on to work as an animator, filmmaker and researcher. His films have been
screened at major festivals around the world. He has written about Reality
Capture (3D scanning), and how this technology can be implemented in
both video games and animation. He worked on the Marketing Mayhem
project, a video game which teaches students about business ethics within
a first-person interactive environment.
Jonathan Stockdale is Professor and Associate Dean at the University of
Westminster, London, in the School of Media, Arts and Design. His multi-
media works have been performed widely in the UK and Norway, including
xiv Notes on Contributors

at the ICA London, the Huddersfield contemporary Music Festival, Bergen

International Contemporary Arts Festival, and the Oslo Konserthaus. He
was a contributor to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the
World, and co-founder of the Jazz Research Journal. As well as working as
an academic consultant in the UK, The Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia
and Singapore, Jonathan is a former winner of the Radio 2 Big Band
Competition (musical director), a founding member of the Leeds Fuse
Festival, a jury member of the Melbourne Prize for Music, and BAFTA jury
member adjudicating in the Best Film Score category.
Jeremy Strong is Professor of Literature and Film at the University of
West London, in the London School of Film, Media and Design. Widely
published on adaptation, he was chair and co-chair of the Association of
Adaptation Studies (2010–16) and sits on the editorial board of its jour-
nal, Adaptation. He speaks about his research at universities and public
events around the world, and writes on a range of topics s­ panning movies,
books, culture and food. His most recent books are Educated Tastes: Food,
Drink and Connoisseur Culture, and the novel Mean Business.
Tim Waterman lives in London and has lectured in Landscape
Architecture at universities around the world. He is the honorary editor of
Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute, for which he writes the
regular column ‘A Word …’. He is also Research Associate for Landscape
and Commons at the arts organisation, Furtherfield. Tim may also be
found from time to time in the pages of Landscape Architecture Magazine
and The Architects’ Journal. He is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape
Architecture and, with Ed Wall, Basics of Landscape Architecture: Urban
Design. These have been translated into seven languages. His research
interests are wide-ranging and address the ways that people form imagina-
tive understandings of urban cultural landscapes in everyday life. This
forms the basis for other explorations of power and democracy, and their
shaping of public space and public life; taste, etiquette, belief and ritual;
and foodways in community and civic life and landscape.
Imelda Whelehan is Professor and Dean of Higher Degree Research at
the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. Her research is in
the fields of women’s writing, feminism, popular culture and literary adap-
tations. She is the author of Modern Feminist Thought (1995), Overloaded
(2000), Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide (2002)
and The Feminist Bestseller (2005). She is co-author of Fifty Key Concepts
 Notes on Contributors 
   xv

in Gender Studies (with Jane Pilcher, 2004) and Screen Adaptation: Impure
Cinema (with Deborah Cartmell, 2010), and co-­editor, with Deborah
Cartmell, of Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (1999) and
The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (2007). Ongoing proj-
ects include a history of the bra, Australian adaptations, post-war adapta-
tions, and representations of ageing in popular culture. She is Co-editor of
Adaptation (Oxford), Associate Editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing
(Oxford) and Co-chair of the Association of Adaptation Studies.
 List of Figures

Breaking Bond’s Balls: A Feminist Re-Reading Ian Fleming

Fig. 1 James Bond as Mills and Boon 109
Live and Let Die: The Tarot as Other in the 007 Universe
Fig. 1 Solitaire in a red silk tunic 151
Fig. 2 Solitaire exotically dressed 151
Fig. 3 The ‘Oh Cult’ Voodoo store 154
Fig. 4 Solitaire stripped of exotic trappings 157
James Bond: The Game
Fig. 1 A virtual Sean Connery in James Bond 007: From Russia with
Love (2005) 266
Fig. 2 Commodore 64 version of A View to a Kill (1985) 269
Fig. 3 Advert for the 1989 game 007: Licence To Kill271
Fig. 4 Natalya Simonova and James Bond in GoldenEye: 007 (1997) 272

xvii
 Introduction

Jeremy Strong

Everybody knows James Bond. Within the Bond stories, and especially the
films, his is a familiar name and face to colleagues and enemies alike, as
well as to bartenders around the world. The unlikeliness of such promi-
nence attaching to an active ‘secret’ agent comprises a part of the narra-
tives’ showy allure, and contrasts with more downbeat, realistic accounts
of espionage as developed by writers such as Somerset Maugham and John
le Carré. Considered as a multimedia phenomenon, only the Star Wars
and Harry Potter franchises might be regarded as serious rivals in terms of
income and reach, though 007 has a clear lead on both in respect of lon-
gevity. Yet the seeming ubiquity and sustained presence of James Bond as
part of our ‘cultural landscape’ (McKay 2008, xi) elides a complex history
spanning appearances in many forms, involving stewardship and contesta-
tion of Bond-as-brand and periods of uncertainty. While successive Bond
narratives have cued us to know that, however dire the predicament, he
will survive,1 succeed, and above all ‘return’, the overarching and ongoing
story of James Bond has no such sense of the inevitable. One of the prin-
cipal themes of this book is how Bond has been adapted, both in the sense

J. Strong (*)
University of West London, London, UK
e-mail: jeremy.strong@uwl.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Strong (ed.), James Bond Uncovered, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76123-7_1
2 J. STRONG

of transitioning across media and of evolving to suit changing tastes and

times, and it is notable that the adaptive journeys, both of particular Bond
texts and of the entire agglomeration, have sometimes been fraught.

The Many Casinos Royale

Analysis of a single title exemplifies the multiform nature of the apparatus
and meanings that cluster around even a fragment of Bond. Take Casino
Royale. These words will, in all probability, suggest a James Bond story to
most people. Even at the loosest level of signification we know that casino
and gambling scenes occur in almost all Bond films, facilitating in turn
another signature element that dominates 007 iconography and promo-
tional materials: Bond in a dinner jacket. ‘Royale’ connotes prestige, lux-
ury and expense, elements prominent in Bond’s high-end lifestyle, as
charted on both page and screen, of brands, places and experiences. It may
also be taken to signify not only his pleasures, but also his duty to crown
and country. More specifically, several different stories or versions are
denoted by Casino Royale. It might, for many, mean the original Bond
novel by Ian Fleming, first published in 1953 and remarkable, inter alia,
for being the text that set in train the many sequels, adaptations and con-
tinuation stories that persist into the present day. Scarcely anyone would
associate the title with a 1954 US television version of that book, a loose
adaptation starring Barry Nelson as American agent ‘Jimmy’ Bond.
Broadcast live and subsequently rediscovered in the 1980s, it is considered
at length in this volume by Jonathan Bignell. Rather better known, though
as much for its failings as its merits, is the 1967 film Casino Royale, which
borrows even less from the literary source. I.Q. Hunter’s chapter here
addresses both the production history and the viewing experience of this
film which, confusingly, may be described as the first film adaptation of the
first Bond novel but not, of course, the first Bond film, a distinction which
belongs to the 1962 adaptation of Dr. No, Fleming’s sixth Bond novel.
Casino Royale was also adapted into a comic strip for the Daily Express,
running from July to December 1958. Unlike the films, which were not
adapted in the same sequence as the Fleming novels had been published,
the Express comic strips did begin with Casino Royale. It was not, however,
the newspaper’s first association with Bond; a serialisation of From Russia,
with Love (Fleming’s fifth novel) had appeared there in 1957 and other
serialised versions followed. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott argue for
this year and Bond’s appearance in the Express as the key first phase in his
 INTRODUCTION 3

transformation into a ‘household name’ (1987, 24). Since the 2006

release of the successful franchise reboot starring Daniel Craig as 007,
Casino Royale will signify that film for many moviegoers. As Chris Cornell’s
theme song for the film reminds viewers, ‘You know my name’; a refrain
which served to introduce a new actor into the role while promising audi-
ences that the movie would combine familiar elements with a degree of
innovation. For gamers, Casino Royale could feasibly mean an eponymous
game-that-never-was, announced by Electronic Arts in 2006 and subse-
quently cancelled when it became apparent that it would not be ready to
coincide with the film’s November release date. Material derived from the
2006 film would have to wait for a new licence-holder, Activision, and the
release of a second Craig Bond film, for a game that merged elements of
both movies’ narratives—007: Quantum of Solace—in 2008. In this vol-
ume, Florian Stephens offers a wide-ranging survey of Bond computer
games and their relationship to antecedent texts, most significantly the
films.

The Rise of the Films

The ascendancy of the Bond films over other iterations of the stories has
been observed by many commentators. Jeremy Black notes that ‘the mod-
ern world knows James Bond through the films, not the novels’ (Black
2005, 91). Bennett makes a similar point when he contends that, despite
the significance of Fleming’s novels as authentic sources, ‘in the construc-
tion and circulation of the figure of Bond, however, the films are clearly
privileged’ (Bennett 1982, 11). Equally, the success of the films has had a
crucial influence on the scale, sales and uses of Bond across other media.
Producer Harry Saltzman stated, for example, that following the release of
the film of Dr. No, which had sold modestly as a novel up to that point,
the publishers Pan sold an additional 1.5 million copies in a mere seven
months (quoted in Lindner 2009, 20). By the time of Fleming’s death in
1964 three Bond films had been made: Dr. No, From Russia with Love
(1963) and Goldfinger (1964). Lindner observes that the films ‘were
instantly and have remained quite spectacularly successful’ (2009, 20). Of
particular relevance here is that Fleming’s early death did not immediately
deprive the filmmakers of potential source material for what had, by that
juncture, clearly emerged as a popular and lucrative series with scope for
ongoing profit. Rather, there existed several published James Bond novels
and short stories, as well as some unfinished work, which could be adapted
4 J. STRONG

to the screen. What the most optimistic forecaster could not have antici-
pated, however, even with a full awareness of the swelling popularity of
Bond and a growing vogue for spy stories through the 1960s, was that the
succeeding decades would see Fleming’s oeuvre mined to exhaustion,
with even the smallest Fleming/Bond fragments serving as springboards
for new movies.2 This, in turn, required the commissioning of new Bond
stories and set in train an interrelationship between Bond films and Bond
novels that has involved both overlap and bifurcation.3 More than fifty
years after Fleming’s death a search for James Bond books will reveal not
only a core ‘canon’ of thirteen of his works but also a significantly greater
number of movie tie-ins and original continuation novels by several differ-
ent authors.4 Where films and tie-in novels coincide, as, for example, the
four stories that map on to Pierce Brosnan’s 007 tenure—GoldenEye
(1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999)
and Die Another Day (2002)—images from the films dominate the cover
art. While this is not the case for continuation novels with no specific film
correlative, it seems unarguable that the films and their enduring popular-
ity have played a major role in sustaining the market for a literary Bond.
Relatedly, the extent to which Bond computer games mirror many aspects
of the movies, including, as Stephens charts here, a substantial degree of
co-development, attests to the films’ pre-eminence in establishing and
developing motifs, recognition and value that may be parlayed into and
mutually reinforced across other media.
It is principally with respect to the films that a Bond or ‘Bondian’
formula may be discussed most fruitfully, though such analysis also
necessitates the acknowledgment of those recurring aspects that owe
their presence to Fleming, and of the extent to which film formula ele-
ments, in turn, inform other media. The identification and critique of
repeated elements and patterns over a corpus of works is, of course, a
staple academic method across a spread of disciplines. Attributed vari-
ously to prevailing industrial/artistic conditions of production, to the
social and economic milieu from which works arise, to the shared politi-
cal and cultural preoccupations of participants, to even deeper psychical
structures, and to the preferences of consumers, such sets of commonali-
ties may be regarded as owing to the deliberate ordering of those who
create, to the unconscious desires of producers and consumers, and to
the critical ingenuity of scholarship that identifies features, devises
groupings, and interprets their significance. Of particular note with
respect to a Bond formula is the extent to which, far from being a critical
 INTRODUCTION 5

gathering requiring any particular theoretical perspective or immersion

in a recherché critical tradition and its terminology, the concept seems to
enjoy an essentially analogous coexistence across producers, consumers
and critics. Sinclair McKay offers the following tongue-in-cheek sum-
mary of what audiences expect: ‘tuxedos, implausible gadgets, glamor-
ous girls with silly names, slightly naff exotic locations, naffer casinos,
weird henchmen, strikingly brassy incidental music, and perhaps even –
if we are very good – a monorail system’ (2008, ix). This is not to claim
that the formula has not evolved or is without nuance, that it is not
simultaneously subject to and influential upon a set of historical vari-
ables, and that its constituent elements cannot be the topic of heated and
serious dispute; the figure of the ‘Bond girl’ and the sexual politics of the
works generally would be an example of the latter. Rather, it is to
acknowledge that just as we all know James Bond, we all seem to be
familiar with a Bond formula.

A ‘Bondian’ Formula
In her analysis of the production of the film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977),
Woollacott identifies how the phrase ‘Bondian’ was used repeatedly by
producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli to characterise the values associated
with a Bond picture and, in particular, to inculcate the appropriate spirit
into those crew members working on their first Bond film (Woollacott
1983). This observation makes a useful starting point for our ­consideration
of the many continuities that comprise the Bond formula. Perhaps the
most important dimension to acknowledge is its deliberate nature, a struc-
turing ethos emanating from the individual with, at that time, overall
responsibility for Bond-on-film—co-producer and former partner Harry
Saltzman had ceased working with Broccoli after The Man with the Golden
Gun (1974), the ninth film in the series made by their company Eon
Productions. Fifteen years after the first Bond film, the series was on its
third leading actor—indeed, The Spy Who Loved Me was Roger Moore’s
third Bond film5—but many other elements and personnel had become
associated firmly either with the series as a whole or with a particular run/
subset of the pictures, a pattern that has continued through to the most
recent releases. An individual picture may well involve a new element,
most significantly a new actor as 007, but that change is always embedded
in and mitigated by a pattern of continuities, including individuals, on and
off screen, as well as a range of narrative and stylistic components.
6 J. STRONG

Our impression of the Bond films as familiar, indeed familial, is linked

in particular to their enduring association with the Broccolis. All the Eon
Bond films have been produced by family members, Cubby having handed
over control to his daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael
G. Wilson in 1995. Beyond this literal sense of family, individual Bond
shoots have been characterised by numerous participants as family gather-
ings to which members would return, frequently for several films in a row,
spread among their other projects. Relatedly, Pinewood Studios is com-
monly posited as a ‘family home’ for the Eon franchise. In terms of recep-
tion, most of the films are broadly for family viewing and, particularly in
Britain, our sense of Bond as a family experience has been abetted by their
transmission on broadcast television. This has been both as heavily trailed
single events for newer releases (especially before the video era, and at
dates often associated with family get-togethers such as Christmas and
Easter holidays) and as part of frequent daytime broadcasts of the series as
a whole.
A sense of family may also be felt to resonate in terms of a tight constel-
lation of characters and, in respect of the films, associated actors, who
recur across many Bond stories. The figure of Bond’s boss M, examined at
length in Lucinda Hobbs’ chapter here, is a principal family member
within the Bond story-world, dispatching Bond on missions and fre-
quently administering gruff reproofs that conceal a mixture of affection
and respect. M is easily read as a father-figure, though as John Pearson
observes in his biography of the author, ‘M’ was also how Fleming referred
to his mother (Pearson 1966). The casting in 1995 of a female M, Judi
Dench, both echoed the real-life situation of Stella Rimington’s 1992
appointment as Director General of MI5 and allowed the development of
a ‘maternal’ dimension to the Bond/M relationship across several films.
While M is not generally present in the main ‘on assignment’ sections of
the stories it is notable that the character has also figured more centrally in
certain Bond stories as someone who must be rescued or protected by
007. The 1968 continuation novel Colonel Sun, written by Kingsley Amis
and published under the pseudonym Robert Markham, has M being kid-
napped, while the 2012 film Skyfall involves M being targeted by a former
protégé. On screen, the two actors most associated with the role have
been Bernard Lee (11 Bond films, 1962–1979) and Dench (8 Bond films,
1995–2015). Other principal recurring members of Bond’s film family are
Miss Moneypenny, Q, CIA agent Felix Leiter, and Bill Tanner—M’s Chief
of Staff. With the same actors frequently used for a long run of films, their
 INTRODUCTION 7

reappearances have helped to cement an impression of continuity across

the pictures and to ease the transition of successive 007s.
In Never Say Never Again (1983)—produced by an independent pro-
duction company, not Eon, and considered in this volume by Wieland
Schwanebeck—a disconcerting effect is produced by the return of Sean
Connery as 007, twelve years since he had last played Bond, but in a film
recognisably shorn of the recurring supporting actors. Instead, Robert
Brown as M, Desmond Llewelyn as Q, and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny
all appeared in A View to a Kill, the Eon Bond production of that year,
with Moore as 007. These and other roles may be considered in terms of
the character functions identified by Russian folklorist Vladimir
Propp (1968), sometimes yielding very specific matches and on other occa-
sions suggesting a broader analogy. Q, for example, may easily be identified
as the ‘donor’ whose magical objects assist the hero/Bond on his quest,
‘M’ as the dispatcher, and Leiter as the ‘helper’. Beyond Bond’s family, the
figure of the Bond girl maps on to the ‘princess’, both rescued by and con-
stituting the prize for the hero’s victory, but is a new character played by a
new actor in each film. Likewise, villains have tended to be memorable
one-offs in different Bond stories, with the exception of recurring super-
villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who is referenced or appears in three Fleming
novels and many of the Eon films, played by several different actors.
In addition to readily recognisable performers, the Bond films have also
developed a range of textual characteristics associated with the contribu-
tion of key personnel, and often continued and/or adapted by others after
those individuals ceased working on Bond productions. Chapman points
to the importance of a ‘core production team’ (2007, 19) in the first six-
teen films of the Eon franchise from Dr. No to License to Kill in 1989, the
year that began the longest screen-Bond hiatus before the series resumed
with Brosnan in 1995. More noteworthy than the fact that several direc-
tors worked on multiple Bond pictures is the extent, ‘unprecedented in
popular cinema’ (ibid., 19), to which other contributors worked on more,
or even most of, those films. Striking title sequences of silhouetted figures,
often nude or semi-nude women, were inaugurated by Maurice Binder,
who created fourteen such Bond titles starting with Dr. No and whose
distinctive style was continued by Daniel Kleinman from the 1990s.
Composer John Barry worked on twelve of the first Bond films. While
there is some dispute over the extent of his involvement in the signature
‘James Bond Theme’ credited to Monty Norman, which Barry (at the
very least) orchestrated, his centrality to the music of Bond films was
8 J. STRONG

firmly established by Goldfinger, where he had full authority over the score
and music, continuing over more than two decades to The Living Daylights
(1987). As Jeff Smith argues, Barry’s Bond music was a ‘vital promotional
tool… and … a remarkably adaptable component of the Bond formula’ (in
Lindner, ed., 2009, 149). In this collection, Jonathan Stockdale’s essay
uses an interview with Norman Wanstall, winner of the 1964 Oscar for
Best Special Effects/Sound on Goldfinger, to examine another of the
acoustic dimensions of the early Bond films—the work of the Sound
Department—in which recurring personnel, especially Gordon McCallum
and Wanstall, created a signature style.
The work of screenwriter Richard Maibaum spans thirteen of the earlier
Bond films and may be characterised broadly as adaptation, in that he
worked from Fleming’s original writings, though the extent to which the
films contain and transpose that material is highly variable. While most of
the 1960s Connery-era films map recognisably on to their source novels,
later adaptations were looser, and The Spy Who Loved Me used only its title.
Bob Simmons worked as stunt co-ordinator on ten of the first Bond films,
and with both Connery and Moore on contemporaneous non-Bond proj-
ects. In formula terms, stunts came to occupy an increasingly important
place in Bond productions and audience expectations, especially as a pre-­
credits sequence, of which perhaps the most celebrated is from The Spy
Who Loved Me, in which 007 skis off a cliff face to escape his pursuers
before deploying a Union Jack parachute. Simmons’ title for his autobiog-
raphy Nobody Does It Better borrows that film’s theme song and highlights
the extent to which, for almost all participants, the Bond association is the
most memorable and marketable aspect of their professional identity.6 It
may also be noted that the Eon Bond films had the same editor, Peter
Hunt,7 for the first five pictures and the same cinematographer, Ted
Moore, for the first four. As the franchise cemented its popularity in the
early-to-mid-1960s with yearly releases, the pictures would be remarkable
for the extent to which those creative roles which determine their look,
texture, pace and mood would be undertaken by many of the same
people.
Finally, production design may well have the greatest claim to being the
most consistently recognisable aspect of the Bond film formula. McKay
describes as ‘a Bond trademark – Ken Adam’s vast, expressionist operatic
sets, against which henchmen and good guys alike would be dwarfed’
(2008, 13). Adam was production designer on seven Bond films, while his
successor Peter Lamont designed nine and had earlier worked, usually
 INTRODUCTION 9

with Adam—as draughtsman, set decorator and art director—on nine

more; a working relationship which evidently served the stylistic continu-
ity of the Eon Bond films. Chapman observes of GoldenEye, for example,
that ‘Peter Lamont’s production design recalls the heyday of Ken Adam’
(2007, 221). This repeated theme of key Bond participants both continu-
ing, to lesser or greater degrees, in the style of their predecessors and/or
advancing through production roles across multiple Bond pictures, may
also be seen in the career of the director who has helmed the most Bond
films, John Glen, who edited three Bond films (1969–1979) before direct-
ing a further five (1981–1989).
Equally, an awareness of the many continuities that comprise the for-
mula should not lead us to either ignore the extent to which innovation
and change may be charted across Bond texts or to presume that, as the
formula emerged, its lineaments were somehow inevitable. A short
­consideration of the second Eon film, From Russia with Love, demon-
strates the extent to which many elements had not yet solidified. A year
earlier, Dr. No had offered audiences several components that, seen in
retrospect, align comfortably with the formula-in-the-making: a villain of
monstrous ambition, a hi-tech villain’s lair in an exotic location, the global
criminal organisation SPECTRE, the interception of spacecraft, a count-
down to potential catastrophe, Britain—in the shape of Bond—rescuing
the USA, and—embodying this fictional reversal of real-world power rela-
tions after Suez—Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) man Felix Leiter per-
forming a function scarcely greater than the local representative of a travel
company. In contrast, From Russia with Love has decidedly fewer Bondian
elements: 007 faces a threat of more quotidian proportions, and the atmo-
sphere seems to align with earlier Istanbul-set spy narratives such as John
Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916) and Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios
(1939). Chapman points specifically to the film’s use of the Orient Express
luxury train as another feature that affords it an old-fashioned quality sug-
gestive of 1930s fiction, and argues that the differences between Dr. No
and From Russia with Love demonstrate that ‘at this early stage of the
series the Bond formula was not yet absolutely fixed’ (2007, 74).
From Russia with Love also reveals some of the adaptive challenges
posed by the changed geopolitical climate even in the short period between
the 1957 novel and the 1963 film ‘as the Cold War emerged from a deep-­
freeze and edged towards an atmosphere of détente’ (Lindner 2009, 81).
In the novel it is the Soviets, and in particular their agency SMERSH, who
lure Bond to Istanbul, whereas on screen it is the fictional non-aligned
10 J. STRONG

criminal organisation SPECTRE (not invented by Fleming until the 1961

novel Thunderball) that targets 007. Jeremy Black observes that ‘the
Fleming corpus on film is annexed to the struggle between SPECTRE and
the Secret Service’ (2005, 114) with evil masterminds seeking to precipi-
tate and profit from conflict between East and West, as opposed to Bond
merely taking on Cold War adversaries, becoming a recurring Bond film
trope. While Fleming responded to global change in the later novels by
creating an apolitical entity to supplant SMERSH, albeit one populated
generously with former Nazis and ex-KGB operatives, from the outset the
filmmakers—operating with the double difficulty of adapting the novels
out of sequence, and of seeking a political tone different from that with
which Fleming had begun writing Bond in the mid-1950s—would on
several occasions have to realign both villains and plots. In his essay for this
volume, which addresses, inter alia, such examples of adaptive changes and
the political and cultural climate that occasioned them, James Chapman
focuses in particular on the relationship of the Bond novels and films to
the ‘end of Empire’.
The From Russia with Love train sequence, and in particular the sleeper
carriage fight between Bond and Red Grant, described by Black as ‘one of
the most gripping fights in the film series’ (2005, 115) may also be con-
sidered in terms of another aspect of the formula, namely that while some
components figure in every, or almost every, Bond film, others are better
understood as elements that make a periodic return. Sometimes absent for
several films, their reappearance cues for audience members the memory
of equivalent antecedents from the Bond canon and, at the level of pro-
duction, will doubtless have been included self-consciously as sequences
or motifs not deployed for a certain duration, the execution of which must
match or ideally ‘top’ their predecessors. This resting and intermittent
returning of certain formula elements clearly facilitates the keeping fresh
of individual Bond film iterations. It allows a balance between novelty and
familiarity that none the less plays to the series’ core strength of exploiting
audience memories and expectations. Hence, Roger Moore’s train car-
riage fight with the steel-armed Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (1973) aligns
with the series’ intermittent use of trains as a glamorous mode of travel
and venue for romantic interludes with Bond girls, and specifically has the
new Bond re-enact a cherished scene. Novelty is introduced in the height-
ened threat posed by Tee Hee’s lethal prosthesis and by the increased
prominence of the comic quip, an element nascent in Connery’s perfor-
mances but significantly enlarged through Moore’s tenure. Relatedly, the
 INTRODUCTION 11

bravura opening sequence of Skyfall, in which Bond chases the assassin

Patrice through Istanbul and on to a moving train, culminating in a fight
on its roof that Bond ultimately loses, is a veritable anthology of formula
elements. Klaus Dodds’ contribution to this volume focuses on Skyfall in
terms of what he characterises as its ‘nostalgic geopolitics’, in which an
ageing, damaged Bond and a compromised Security Service must take on
an altered, contemporary, threat.
The inclusion of an obligatory chase, in Skyfall involving cars and
motorcycles, which in other films from the series have also featured
speedboats, helicopters, submersibles, dune buggies, rickshaws, skidoos
and skiers, grew from a comparatively modest sequence in Dr. No, filmed
using back-projection, with Connery in a Sunbeam Alpine. Culminating
in a crash and fireball that kills his pursuers, the sequence is also signifi-
cant for inaugurating the Bondian throwaway line at a villain’s demise,
motivated by his driving a hearse: ‘I think they were on their way to a
funeral.’ Tom Gunning’s 1986 article ‘The Cinema of Attractions’,
identifies a strand of filmmaking in which narrative does not always exer-
cise its predominance over cinema’s potential for ‘exhibitionist’ and sen-
sory effects, often associated with technology and movement. It is
evident that Bond film chases, while notionally motivated by plot events,
are principally a textual pleasure of this order—and, of course, one facili-
tated by page-to-screen adaptation—in which kinetic possibilities assert
their authority over a temporarily suspended storytelling function.
Indeed, so anticipated has such a sequence become as a vital formula ele-
ment that the relative flimsiness of the motivating factors ostensibly
prompting the chase, especially through the Moore years, could be rel-
ished as a pleasure in its own right. Bond’s use of the digger in the
Skyfall train sequence to take on the better-armed Patrice also re-works
the motif of 007 as an improviser capable of making use of unlikely
vehicles, itself a facet of his seemingly limitless competence. While he is
invariably associated with specialist gadgetry, and a scene in which Q
issues such materials is a deeply familiar Bondian element, his making use
of what is at hand, sometimes to comic effect, is also a repeated device of
the series. Using an elderly double-decker bus to escape, and shedding
its roof under a low bridge, in Live and Let Die, and having no recourse
but to an under-powered Citroën 2CV in For Your Eyes Only (1981) are
examples of the filmmakers’ self-awareness and in particular formula-
awareness. Understanding that fast, expensive cars, as well as chases, are
expected elements, they have on occasion both delivered and played
12 J. STRONG

with that expectation by including the desirable car elsewhere in the film
but varying or burlesquing the chase.
Skyfall’s chase also recycles one of the less palatable elements of the
formula, the deployment of the ‘foreign’ street or market as the setting for
the chase or contest between Bond and his opponents. Upturned market
stalls, scattered goods and jeopardised locals are insistently, sometimes
even comically, figured as the insignificant collateral damage of the encoun-
ter between First-World adversaries. Tim Waterman’s chapter here attends
closely to the flavour and politics of such scenes, and to the movies’ han-
dling of place generally. The use of an iconic ‘signature’ location, in the
case of Skyfall, Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, is part of the globetrotting that
defines Bond films, and which, in turn, has required increasing efforts
from filmmakers to deliver novelty for audiences having a greater experi-
ence of travel than at the series’ commencement in the early 1960s.
Describing his approach to directing The World Is Not Enough, Michael
Apted considered location to be a key component of the formula: ‘You
have to deliver icons. Girls, gadgets, action and exotic locations. Hence
Bilbao and the Guggenheim building. When the Bond films started, exotic
meant palms and beaches, which aren’t exotic anymore’ (quoted in McKay
2008, 321). Joyce Goggin’s chapter on the adaptation of Live and Let Die
focuses in particular on the texts’ construction of the exotic, of ‘otherness’
and racial difference, in terms of the representation of the Tarot, the char-
acter of Solitaire, and the commingling of sexuality and exoticism.

Typing Bond
The categorisation of the James Bond stories, especially the films, is an
exercise that hindsight has rendered wholly different from the task faced
by early readers, viewers and reviewers. The term ‘Bond’, or ‘Bond film’ is
now commonly deployed as a classificatory device or comparator with
which to situate many other stories involving espionage, adventure or
action. So influential has the character and series been that it can be diffi-
cult either to imagine a time when Bond was not pre-eminent—the pro-
genitor of countless imitators and variants—or to recognise the extent to
which Bond drew, and has continued to draw on, other genres, modes and
cycles. In a 1953 letter to his publisher, Jonathan Cape, Fleming wrote
bullishly of his hopes for increased sales with subsequent Bond novels, and
twice refers to his ambition to progress ‘into the Cheyney class’ (quoted in
Fergus Fleming, ed., 2016, 34–35). Any modern-day reader would be
 INTRODUCTION 13

forgiven for not being familiar with the work of crime writer Reginald
Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney, a popular author of the 1940s. For the
intervening years have not only served to illustrate the transitory nature of
Cheyney’s fame but also to show quite how far Fleming’s ambitions were
outstripped: first, by the growing popularity of his novels; and ultimately
by the enormous and enduring cultural significance of the character he
created and the series of films in which the character appears.
For McKay, Fleming’s Bond novels may be understood as an ‘invigorat-
ing, sophisticated form of popular fiction’ (2008, 1) well-timed to cap-
ture, and to shape, contemporary tastes. This accords with Fleming’s own
characterisation of his work as ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’
(quoted in Lindner 2009, 13) and leads to the question of how, and by
whom, they were read. In a much-quoted 1957 letter to US broadcaster
CBS, then considering adapting Bond for television, Fleming states:

In hard covers my books and readership are written for and appeal princi-
pally to an ‘A’ readership, but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks,
both in England and in America and it appears that the ‘B’ and ‘C’ classes
find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the
sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experi-
ence and in part incomprehensible. (quoted in Black 2005, 156)

In this volume, Graham Holderness recalls his experience as a teenage

reader of the newly-published paperbacks, coming from a socio-economic
background that Fleming imagined would render aspects of the texts inac-
cessible. He contrasts this with his later re-readings informed by, though
not always in easy accord with, relevant critical and theoretical discourses.
The transition from hardback to paperback may also fruitfully be under-
stood as a key early phase in the adaptation of Bond, one of the many re-­
versionings that have altered and expanded the forms in which he may be
encountered. If Fleming initially approached Casino Royale as a story that
might appeal to a limited ‘knowing’ readership, equipped with certain
cultural competences, he certainly came to understand and craft the Bond
novels as popular fiction for a mass market. By 1963 he described the
Bond novels as books ‘written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway
trains, airplanes or beds’ (quoted by Chapman 2007, 1). The foreground-
ing of sexuality in his characterisation of his readership, and by implication
sexual matters more generally, chimes with the significance afforded to
sexual content by critics, from whom the stories’ combination of sex and
14 J. STRONG

violence drew varied responses. Reviewing Dr. No in the New Statesman

in 1958, Paul Johnson described it as ‘the nastiest book I have ever read’
(1958, 431). Conversely, in her review of the film adaptation four years
later, the Daily Mail’s Margaret Hinxman stated that despite ‘deploring its
sadism, its ethics and its amorality, I admit I enjoyed every depraved and
dazzling moment of it’ (quoted in McKay 2008, 30). Focusing on certain
of the same aspects of the works that troubled and galvanised early critics,
Imelda Whelehan’s contribution to this volume is a feminist re-reading of
Fleming’s Bond novels. As she acknowledges, it is the response of a ‘resist-
ing reader’ who nonetheless identifies the extent to which the novels,
rather than merely being a nostalgic celebration of masculine ascendency,
invariably jeopardise Bond’s masculinity and render it unstable.
Chapman usefully adduces the description of a newly-released Dr. No
by film journalist Josh Billings as ‘a bizarre comedy melodrama’ as evi-
dence of how experienced reviewers and critics struggled to locate the
first Bond film in terms of the ‘existing generic profile of popular cinema’
(2007, 54). One critic who found the Bond films particularly ideologi-
cally harmful was the Daily Worker’s Nina Hibbin. Of From Russia with
Love she opined that ‘although the film appears to be sending up the
cloak-and-­dagger tradition, in reality (along with its predecessor Dr. No)
it is building up a tradition that is far more vicious’ (1963). While it is
unsurprising that the paper representing the Communist Party of Great
Britain should find Bond reactionary and problematic, of particular inter-
est here is the extent to which the review participates in the interpretive
quandary that has engaged many other viewers; namely, whether the
films are intended to be taken altogether seriously. Although Hibbin’s
assessment that the film only masquerades as a ‘send up’ so that its con-
tent may seem more innocuous is a more complex, if politically preor-
dained, reading, the question of whether Bond films are best understood
as spoofs, borrowings-­from, or parodies of other types of texts arose early
and has endured. Looking back at a substantial body of films that now
span more than half a century it seems relatively easy to discern a waxing
and waning of the extent to which a particular movie or subset has lighter
or more comic elements, engages in parody, or invites a reading as
tongue-in-cheek. Hence the Moore years have been interpreted in terms
of a turn towards light comedy, the two Dalton pictures as an attempt at
gritty realism, the Brosnan series as a compromise, albeit inflected by his
prior casting as a parody Bond figure in the TV series Remington Steele.
While in the early 1960s there was inevitably less potential to either cre-
 INTRODUCTION 15

ate or discern comedy through self-referentiality, there still existed con-

siderable exegetical possibilities, and difficulties, based on the relationship
of those first Bond films to a range of potential antecedent genres, subject
matter and styles.
For Lindner it is the combination of elements assembled by Fleming in
the 1950s that ‘created a genre – and even a culture – of its own’ with a
new brand of secret agent fiction that ‘first hijacked the popular imagina-
tion’ (2009, 77). Though he also affords significant influence to Len
Deighton and John le Carré, Lindner particularly credits Fleming with
the development of ‘a variation on the popular genre of detective writing
that registered and responded to post-war concerns about crime, con-
spiracy and human agency’ (ibid., 77). In other words, rather than devel-
oping a variant on existing writing about spies and espionage, Fleming
was principally adapting an existing genre of crime writing by vastly
expanding the scale and significance of the crimes to be investigated and/
or forestalled. The films, in turn, would further magnify and monumen-
talise through their visualisation—and in the case of set-construction, the
physical realisation—of spaces consonant with the terrible ambitions of
criminals operating on a global scale. Combining this radical repurposing
of an existing generic framework with a seductive rendering of Bond’s
consumption and material pleasures, Fleming’s formula was especially
attractive to post-war readers emerging from a period of austerity. In this
volume, Strong’s chapter examines in detail the rendering of food and
drink in the Bond novels, focusing in particular on the recurring theme
of 007 as an astute discriminator.
Chapman also identifies the precise historical juncture in the film
industry when Bond was adapted as being vitally significant to the look
and feel of the films: ‘The demise of the B-movie …combined with the
trend towards fewer films, helped to bring about the circumstances in
which Bond could flourish as A-feature material’ (2007, 45). While Dr.
No was not expensive by the standards of subsequent Bond films, it was
nonetheless made to a standard that significantly outstripped the resources
that would have been likely to have been afforded to a secret agent thriller
or crime picture just a few years earlier. Given the paramount importance
afforded to high production values on Bond pictures following Goldfinger,
indeed of their centrality to a Bondian formula, it is difficult to conceive
of how, and particularly if, the franchise might have unfolded had its first
film outing been a lower-budget affair. That Fleming vigorously pursued
the possibility of screen adaptations of Bond from the earliest opportunity
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expediency, of sweeping away the rule of the natural rulers of the
country?
 CHAPTER X
THE FOUNDATIONS OF NATIVE SOCIETY—THE TENURE OF LAND

Having indicated some of the quagmires into which direct rule

would lead us, one may now pass to an examination of the
foundations upon which native law and custom repose in the
organized society of the north, as revealed by systematic inquiry
extending over the past five years. Essentially the same groundwork
is found in the more rudimentary pagan communities which have
remained without the area of Mohammedan organization.
Incidentally, it may be well to mark that Northern Nigeria has not
evolved powerful pagan organisms comparable with those of Yoruba
and Benin in the south. The basis of the social system is the village
community. A number of village communities form the tribal
community. The partly hereditary, partly elective rule of the tribal
community constitutes, with the Executive, the Government of the
entire community. The ruler himself is the “Governor,” against whose
actions the people can appeal to native law and custom. For the
welfare of that community the ruler is guardian. Land is the common
heritage of the community. The ruler is trustee for the land. Upon him
devolves the granting of rights of occupancy. The structural law of
tenure is the right of occupier and user, not of owner. Private
ownership of land is unknown. The cultivator is, in reality, a licensee.
Alienation of land is unknown. The unit of taxation is the village
community. Each individual is supposedly assessed according to his
earning capacity. If he is an agriculturist he furnishes a proportion of
his crop, which, in effect, is a rent paid to the community for the use
of land. If an artisan, he pays a tax upon his trade. If a herdsman,
upon his cattle. The community as a whole is subject to specific
imposts which assist in maintaining the civil list of the ruler. The
character of the taxes and imposts follows the requirements of the
Koranic law modified, when considered expedient, by pre-Koranic
customary law. Justice is administered by judges conversant with the
sacred books, appointed by the ruler and exercised on the principles
of Koranic law. If a balance could be struck, it would probably be
found that a system of this kind ensures a greater amount of human
happiness than many of the forms of government even now existing
in Europe. Indeed, the closer one’s knowledge of African life and the
more insight one obtains into the immense sea of human misery
heaving beneath the crust of Western civilization, the more one is led
to marvel at the shallow commonplaces which picture the African
wallowing in degraded barbarism. Like all institutions, the African
system lends itself to abuse. Those abuses the British Administration
has set itself to correct, while maintaining the system itself. Upon the
Colonial Office continuing to support that policy, and upon the men
who are applying it on the spot being enabled to go on with their
work free from interference, depends the future happiness and
prosperity of the Nigerian peoples, which, in effect, is at once the
Imperial interest and the justification of Imperial rule.
The British, having replaced the Fulani, are in native law and
custom the conquering tribe. The urgency of devoting as much time
as it was possible to spare from the pressing problems of the hour
demanding daily solution, to an investigation of the exact conditions
prevailing in each province was, therefore, imperative. In so
extensive a territory, differing local circumstances affecting soil,
population, occupation, distribution of power, and so on, had
obviously created different methods or rather heads of taxation and
variation in the formulæ of Government, assessment and levying of
revenue, etc. One question above all others had to be elucidated,
that of the ownership of land—basis of the whole social edifice. Sir
Frederick Lugard initiated these inquiries. They were vigorously
prosecuted by Sir Percy Girouard and the Residents, and when it
became apparent beyond all possibility of doubt that the land,
whether actually occupied or not, was national; that freehold property
was foreign to all native ideas; and that, under native law and
custom, the new rulers of the country were recognized as holders of
the land in trust for the people and, thereby, the grantors of
occupants’ rights, Sir Percy Girouard pressed for these cardinal
principles being given force of law. Legislation which should embody
them was, moreover, of additional moment for two reasons. First,
because the opening up of the country was bound to give rise to the
danger of alienation of occupancy rights creeping in and being
incorporated into native custom, out of which would automatically
evolve a customary sanction for the mortgaging of land, the creation
of a class of landlords, a wide field for the European speculator in
land, and a general break-up of the native system. Secondly,
because the approach of the railways, the development of roads, the
increasing demand for foodstuffs and the all-round intensifying
economic pressure were bound, once more automatically, to
originate, independently of the industry of the cultivator, an
incremental value in the land. Before that state of affairs was brought
home to the native and had, perhaps, been made under native law
and custom, the subject of private property, which would have meant
the creation of vested interests difficult to displace, it was the
obvious duty of a Government trustee for the community to step in
and secure these expanding values for the future benefit of that
community. But things move slowly in West Africa, and legislation of
the kind referred to was novel: unique, indeed. West Africa’s
problems had never been thought out ahead before. Just as matters
were ripening, Sir Percy Girouard was suddenly transferred to East
Africa. But the Colonial Office was sympathetic, and there were men
in Nigeria who, comprehending well the perils of leaving the land
question unregulated, were determined to do their utmost to push
the matter through.
On January 1st of this year the most far-seeing measure of
constructive statesmanship West Africa has ever known was put
upon the statute-book. “The Land and Native Rights Proclamation”
consecrates the three main principles of native law and custom.
First, that the whole of the land whether occupied or unoccupied is
“native land.” Secondly, that the land is under the control and subject
to the disposition of the Governor, to be “held and administered by
him for the use, need and common benefit of the natives of Northern
Nigeria.” Thirdly, that the Governor’s power shall be exercised in
accordance with “native laws and customs.” For the rest, and without
going into detail, the measure can be described as expressing the
native system, and the natural developments of the native system, in
English. It is not, in Nigeria, an innovating measure, but a
conservative measure; not an experiment, but a preservation of the
status quo. It is not a measure of land nationalization, because land
nationalization means State control of the land and all that is done
upon it. What this measure does is to provide for the communalizing
of the communal value of the land, leaving the occupier full control
over the use of land and full benefit for his private enterprise upon it,
with payment of rent to the community to which the land belongs,
instead of to a landlord. The individual’s right to all that is due to
individual work and expenditure, but not to the communal value, is
secured. No freehold can creep in and no monopoly profit can be
made out of the land. The holding up of land for speculative
purposes is, in effect, penalized, while the man who is industrious is
not made to pay more as the outcome of his enterprise. At the same
time the basis is laid for a land revenue which, with the years, will be
the chief source of income of the Government—the healthiest form
of income, perhaps, for any Government. For the first time in the
history of West Africa, the art of governing the native on native lines
has become consecrated in British legislation and the pernicious
tradition of applying the law of England to African land questions has
been set aside. It is impossible to exaggerate the potentialities for
good of such a departure from crude, ignorant and unscientific
precedent. It will be the duty of the Colonial Office, to whom
everlasting credit is due for having sanctioned this proclamation, to
watch strictly that the principles laid down therein are not departed
from in practice, and to apply them, with the modifications of method
which differing and pre-existing conditions render advisable, to
Southern Nigeria also. That attempts to undermine the provisions
and the spirit of the Northern Nigerian law will arise, may be
unhesitatingly assumed.
 CHAPTER XI
THE FOUNDATIONS OF NATIVE SOCIETY—THE ADMINISTRATIVE
MACHINERY

The policy of governing Northern Nigeria on native lines—in other

words, of training the natives to govern themselves instead of trying
to govern them ourselves—has the approval of the entire native
community except the criminal classes, who would be the only ones
to benefit by a weakening in the position of the native authorities and
in the decay of the etiquette attaching to their position. It is being
pursued in every branch of the Administration concurrently, with a
steadily marked improvement in the efficiency and purity of the
public service.
The native administrative machinery varies slightly in the different
Emirates, and is better organized in some than in others, but a
description of the system as it obtains in the Kano Emirate, which is
a little larger than Belgium and Luxemburg, will serve as a general
indication applicable in its essentials to the others. The executive
consists of the Emir—advised and assisted by the Resident—and his
judicial and executive Council, composed of the Waziri (Vizier, or
Chief of Staff), the Maji (Treasurer), the Alkali (Chief Justice), and
five Mallamai (“teachers,” men versed in the law and in the customs
of the country) of repute. This is the Supreme Court of Appeal. The
Emirate is divided into districts under a district Chief or Headman
(Hakima) responsible to the Executive. Each district is divided into
sub-districts under a sub-district Chief or Headman (Maijimilla)
responsible to the District Headman. Each sub-district is composed
of townships or villages with village-heads (Masugari) responsible to
the sub-district Headman.
Kano city itself is under the supervision of the Maajen-Wuteri, who
corresponds roughly with our English mayor with twenty town police
(dogarai), picturesque individuals in red and green, and twenty night
watchmen (masugefia) under him. Ninety more police are spread
over the various districts and attached to the District Courts. There
are no British native police whatever. That experiment was tried for a
time, being attended with such conspicuous ill-success and being
accompanied by such an increase in crime that it was wisely
abandoned. Nothing could surely convey a more striking proof of the
order reigning throughout the Emirate and of the law-abiding
character of the people, than the fact of its being policed with ninety
men armed with nothing more formidable than a sword. Think of
ninety constables sufficing for Belgium and Luxemburg or any other
area of 13,000 square miles in Western Europe; or take the
population of the Emirate—one and a half millions—and point to a
single comparable proportion of police to population in Europe.
Crimes of violence are extraordinarily scarce, and the Native
Administration, backed by the British “raj,” has now such a hold upon
the country that for a case to be unreported would be hardly
possible. The roads are safe for the solitary traveller—I frequently
passed women alone, or accompanied by a child, sometimes
husband, wife and child, many miles from the capital. I have walked
alone save for one white companion through the deserted streets of
Kano city at night. Kano city is not, however, free from thieves, and
seeing that so many strangers are constantly coming and going it is
hardly to be wondered at. Some two years back night burglaries
became unpleasantly frequent. Native ingenuity hit upon a plan to
cope with them. The services of the professional rat-catchers were
enlisted. They were enrolled as night-watchmen, paid £1 a man, and
told they would be fined 2s. 6d. every time a robbery was committed.
Very few fines were inflicted, and Kano was cleared of its nocturnal
undesirables “one time.”
The general standard of probity among the inhabitants of Kano
themselves is, however, shown by the free and easy manner in
which merchandise is left unguarded in the great market, and it
appears that lost property is constantly being handed over to the
Alkali, who has the articles called out by a public crier in the market-
place.
The absence of a fixed scale of emoluments for public servants is
always the weak point of native government. Northern Nigeria was
no exception to the rule. The proportion of the taxes actually
collected which eventually found its way into the so-called Public
Treasury, was used by the Emir with small regard to the public
interest and with a great deal for his own. The Alkalis and their
assessors, though by no means universally corrupt, were dependent
for their living upon such sources as the fees (usheri) upon judgment
debts and upon the estates of deceased persons (ujera). To Mr.
Charles Temple, now Acting Governor, whose knowledge of Northern
Nigeria and its peoples is unequalled, belongs the credit of having
instituted in the Kano Emirate the Beit-el-Mal or Public Treasury in
the proper sense of the word, which has since been extended, or is
being extended, into all of them. The system follows traditional lines
but vastly improves them. In practice it works out as follows. Half the
total revenue collected goes direct to the Northern Nigeria
Government. Of the remaining half, fifty per cent. is paid into the
Beit-el-Mal to provide salaries for the native officials and to pay for
necessary public works. The balance is divided into fifths on the
basis of two-fifths of each district’s yield to the District Headman;
two-fifths of the sub-district’s yield to the Sub-district Headman; one-
fifth of his own village’s yield to the Village Headman. It will doubtless
be possible, as the system becomes perfected, for each district to
have its own Beit-el-Mal with limited powers, receiving its instructions
from the central Beit-el-Mal, just as the local British Treasuries
receive instructions from the Treasury at Zungeru. This would enable
the District Heads, Sub-district Heads and Village Heads to have
fixed salaries like the Native Executive, a very desirable ideal to aim
at.
The Emir draws a fixed sum monthly from the Beit-el-Mal for his
private expenses, which are numerous, and the public expenditure is
accounted for and overlooked by the Resident. The Waziri draws
£1000 a year, the Maji £360, the Alkali £600, the Limam (High Priest)
£72. There are thirteen districts in charge of thirteen local Alkalis
drawing £60 a year each. The public works completed out of the
Beit-el-Mal funds during the last year or two include the rebuilding of
the Kano market at a cost of £600, a new jail at a cost of £1000, a
new Court House, £250, besides keeping the thirteen gates of the
city in repair, additions to the mosque, etc. In regard to the latter, it is
interesting to note that the work of adding to the mosque and
repairing the minaret, was entirely carried out by contract labour. The
contract was given out by the Emir and the contractor paid the
workmen to the number of over a thousand, a previously unheard-of
event in native annals and an example of one of the many
improvements which the Native Administration is carrying out under
British influence. The Emir has also directed that £1000 shall be
contributed to the National School at Nassarawa, which I shall have
occasion to speak about in a subsequent letter. Legislation for the
purpose of legally constituting the native Beit-el-Mals would seem to
be called for.

CORNER OF A NATIVE MARKET.

 ANOTHER CORNER.

The administration of justice has been vastly purified by the

inauguration of fixed emoluments. The District Courts and the
Supreme Court administer Koranic law, or customary law, i.e.
traditional law based on custom, or Government proclamations.
Speaking generally, the Alkalis are a fine body of men, and they
appear to be realizing more and more the dignity and responsibilities
of their position. The chief Alkali in particular is a man of very high
character. The legal code in criminal and civil matters is, of course,
mainly inspired by the sacred books, and the Alkali is generally a
Doctor of Mohammedan common law. His influence and power
appear to be more extensive than that of the Egyptian kadi, since he
has jurisdiction in criminal cases and in land suits, which the latter
has not. Of the cases tried in the courts of the Kano Emirate, about
30 per cent. are matrimonial, such as divorce, restitution of conjugal
rights, alimony, etc. The courts are very hard worked, dealing with
about 7000 to 8000 cases per annum, and the Alkalis fully earn their
salaries. I attended the chief Alkali’s court in Kano city, and was
greatly impressed by the general decorum, the respect shown to the
Alkali, the activity of the assessors, the marshalling of the witnesses,
the order, rapidity, and business-like manner in which the whole
proceedings were conducted. It was an example of native self-
government in Western Africa which would have astonished a good
many people in Europe. No British court, no alien magistrate, could
possibly deal with these “affairs of the people,” which require a
complete mastery of Koranic law and customary law, such a mastery
as only a trained native can ever acquire, and it is to be hoped that
any attempts which may arise to curtail the jurisdiction of the native
courts—accepted by all classes of natives—will be promptly
discouraged, together with similar attempts to interfere with the
present Beit-el-Mal system. From a practical point of view the
maintenance of the Native Administration, guided and supervised by
the Resident, i.e. indirect rule, is inseparable from the financial
question. If the Native Administration were not financially provided
for it would cease to exist. If the Emirs and their executives were
converted into mere civil pensioners of the Government, they would
become figure-heads deprived of all power and prestige. Under the
system I have described the Emirs have power, and only hyper-
sensitiveness and short-sightedness can see in their power our
weakness. It is, on the contrary, our strength and defence against
the reactionary elements which exist, and which are bound to exist in
a country but newly occupied, and which are certainly not less
hostile to the native authorities, who pursue their labours under the
ægis of the British “raj,” than they are to the British “raj” itself.
Anything that impairs the influence of the native authorities, not only
impairs the efficiency of the Administration of the country, but is an
invitation to lawlessness and disorder.
It is only fair to state in this connection that the initiative of
perpetuating, under British rule and with the modifications required,
the system of land taxation indigenous to the community, was due to
the suggestion of Sir William Wallace, for many years Acting High
Commissioner of Northern Nigeria.
 CHAPTER XII
THE PRESERVATION OF THE NATIONAL LIFE

Among those to whom the government of the coloured races of

mankind appears in the light of a sacred trust committed to an
Imperial white people, as to the servants of that people possessing
the widest experience in the practice of such government, the
preservation of the national life of these races must be a matter of
paramount importance. Increased knowledge born of familiarity in
the art of tropical government and of anthropological knowledge, a
clearer realization of human needs which an expanding mental
horizon brings with it, are teaching us many things. They are
teaching us that there can be no common definition of progress or
common standard for all mankind; that the highest human
attainments are not necessarily reached on parallel lines; that man’s
place and part in the universe around him must vary with the
dissimilarities of race and environment; that what may spell advance
for some races at a particular stage in their evolution may involve
retrogression, if not destruction, for other races in another stage; that
humanity cannot be legislated for as though every section of it were
modelled on the same pattern; that to disregard profound divergence
in culture and racial necessities is to court disaster, and that to
encourage national growth to develop on natural lines and the
unfolding of the mental processes to proceed by gradual steps, is the
only method by which the exercise of the Imperial prerogative can be
morally justified. Our one and only conspicuous Imperial failure was
due to a misguided belief that we could, and that it was desirable in
our own interests that we should, crush out nationality by violence. It
inflicted upon the victims immense misery and upon the performers
embarrassments which have endured for centuries. Elsewhere we
are experiencing the discomforting reflex of a policy based upon the
supposition that East is capable of assimilation with West under alien
guidance. British India is rent with confusion and mentally unsettled
by a jumble of conflicting ideals, to which the Protected Native States
offer a contrast that cannot but carry with it its own very significant
lessons.
All the good work accomplished in Northern Nigeria during the last
seven years can be flung away by a refusal to benefit from
experience in other parts of the world. In pleading for the slow but
sure policy everywhere in Nigeria, and in pleading that where in
Nigeria national life has already expanded through the exercise of its
own internal forces into organized communities, possessing their
own laws and customs, their own machinery of government and their
own well-defined characteristics, that national life shall be protected,
preserved and strengthened to enable it to bear the strain of new
conditions, one is pleading, it seems to me, for the true welfare of the
people and for the highest concept of Imperialism.
These considerations hold good as regards every branch of
European activity. Effective British political control does not require
constant encroachments of departmental activity. British industrial
interests can be allowed to find a natural outlet in the ordinary play of
economic forces without calling upon Government assistance, for
example, to undermine a national weaving industry in which, as
Barth remarked of it many years ago, there is something that is “truly
grand,” giving employment and support as it does to innumerable
families without compelling them to sacrifice their domestic habits or
to pass their lives in immense establishments detrimental to health.
British commercial necessities do not demand that the big native
cities should be thrown open to the White trader, who can pursue his
useful avocations just as well, and certainly with much greater regard
to health conditions, outside than inside them. In the same way the
advent of the missionary into the organized Mohammedan provinces
of the north before the country is ripe to receive them, would be a
positive danger, besides being an act perilously akin to a breach of
faith. Surely we have become sufficiently intelligent to take a broadly
human view of these things? There is a field in pagan Northern and
pagan Southern Nigeria sufficiently extensive to occupy all the
energies of all the missions put together, without invading the heart
of Moslem Nigeria. The advent of Christian missions into Kano or
Katsina or Sokoto, for example, would be regarded as an act of
aggression. Their presence in Zaria is a great mistake, and I make
bold to assert that it is only comparable to a man smoking a pipe on
a barrel of gunpowder. We hold this newly occupied country by the
force of our prestige, far more than by the very small number of
native troops in our service. That it is the duty of Government to
prevent the introduction of elements, whatever their character and
however lofty their motives, whose presence is calculated to cause
unrest, is sufficiently self-evident as not to need emphasizing. No
Government can afford to disregard so clear a view as that
formulated, for example, in the Emir of Kano’s letter given in Chapter
VIII. But one would desire, if possible, that the leaders of the
Christian Churches themselves should be brought to appreciate the
justice of the contention. The establishment of Christian missions in
the Mohammedan Emirates would not succeed in damming up the
self-propelling currents of Islamic propaganda which are permeating
Nigerian paganism. That is the true problem which the Churches
have to face.
The question of economic development is on the same plane. That
peace, the advent of railways and the growth of population will
eventually result in the creation of a large commercial movement of
affairs with Northern Nigeria—apart from the mineral output—is not
to be doubted. But exaggeration as regards immediate prospects is
to be deprecated, and the claims of economic development,
important as they are, should not be allowed to play too great a part
in administrative solicitude. The main concern of the Administration
for the next few years should be that of placing the political, financial
and educational organization of the country upon secure
foundations. Political unrest and social confusion are stumbling-
blocks to commercial progress, and everything should be done to
avoid them. Those in a position to realize the marvels already
accomplished in this region of Africa by the handful of British officials
administering the country, and the many problems requiring on the
part of those who are called upon to deal with them the utmost
delicacy and tact in adjustment, cannot but enter a caveat against all
tendencies, from whatever source they may emanate, be they of
self-interest or of unselfish devotion, to “rush” Northern Nigeria.
Rapid expansion does not necessarily mean progress. Sometimes it
means exactly the reverse. Let us, rendered wise by experience
elsewhere, set our faces like flint against the “Europeanizing” of
Northern Nigeria. In Sierra Leone, in the Gold Coast, in the Western
Provinces of Southern Nigeria we have daily object-lessons of the
deplorable results of this denationalizing process. That Northern
Nigeria should be preserved from it must be the earnest wish of all
who are acquainted with its peoples and alive to their possibilities.
 CHAPTER XIII
A PAGE OF HISTORY AND ITS MORAL

If we have the imagination to grasp the true significance of the

events which led, a century ago, to the break-up of the Hausa
dynasty by the Fulani, we shall find the key to the moral side of
permanently successful government in Northern Nigeria. The motive
of the Fulani jihad has usually been attributed either to mere
religious fanaticism or to personal and racial ambition; or, again, as
an incident in the prolonged struggle for power on the part of this or
that ruler or dynasty which has destroyed the fertile uplands of
Western Africa south of the Sahara since the shattering of the
ancient Niger civilizations by the Moorish invasion at the end of the
sixteenth century. It appears to me that this appreciation is
superficial, and that we must look deeper than the surface results. I
am not sure that these surface results themselves do not suggest
the need of doing so. A man of letters galvanizing a whole
countryside to revolt against oppression. Shepherds and cowherds
flinging away their sticks and staves and rallying to his standard.
Initial defeat turned into victory. A number of independent States
converted into a homogeneous entity acknowledging a temporal and
spiritual over-lord. An immense region ill-provided with means of
internal communication brought to recognize one common authority
—and all within a year or two. These are remarkable occurrences.
They insinuate the existence of some driving force below the
surface. Is it possible to trace that force in the chequered annals of
this part of Africa?
The Moorish invasion dealt the great Negroid Empire of the middle
Niger—the Empire of the Songhay—a blow from which it never
recovered. The invasion did not actually swamp the Hausa States,
but its indirect consequences must have been felt throughout them in
everywhere shaking established order, and in the decay of spiritual
influence following upon the heels of anarchy. In the absence of any
continuous written records, the history of the period following the
advance of Morocco’s musketeers into the Western Sudan, appears
to Western minds as a confused medley of internecine strife without
defined objects of any kind. One can imagine, let us say, a Chinese
historian picturing the history of England from the tenth to the
fifteenth century much in the same light, if his materials for
composing it were almost wholly confined to oral traditions. But a
close study of the few documents at our disposal must, I think,
induce the belief that, dating from the introduction of a higher
spiritual influence into the country—Mohammedanism had begun to
acquire a footing by the eleventh century—the land was never free
from an agency which sought the uplifting of society. Before the
Moorish generals carried fire and sword into the Niger Valley, holy
voices were raised in protest against the “decay of faith with the
increase of infidelity.” “Not one of the acts forbidden by God”—
lament learned Arabic historians—“but was openly practised; wine
was drunk, and adultery had become so frequent that its practice
seemed to have acquired legality.” The terrible punishment which
ensued was ascribed to these lapses: “It was on account of these
abominations that God avenged Himself by calling in the victorious
Moroccan army.” We seem to be listening to another Moses
denouncing the wickedness of the people of Israel. In the midst of all
these disordered turmoils, when the worship of the true God was
being swept aside by a wave of recrudescent paganism, when
mosques were being destroyed and desecrated and social
lawlessness reigned supreme, little knots of true believers gathered,
forming as it were islands in the sea of turbulence and moral
abasement, to which Christian Europe added a renewed element of
subversion by her demand for slaves, thus intensifying internal
warfare by furnishing it with a new and deadly incentive.
There is evidence that in the middle and towards the close of the
eighteenth century the Hausa Kings were relapsing into paganism (in
Zaria, for instance, the old Hausa “Tsafi,” customs—rock worship—
had been revived). It was at this period that the spark of a spiritual
renascence arose in the most northerly of the Hausa States, Gober.
Othman Fodio, a Fulani, ultimately the leader of the uprising, was
above all a moral and spiritual reformer, as was his teacher the
Mallam Jibrila. He sought to raise the whole tone of society. He used
his influence at the Court of the Hausa King to secure the building of
schools and the spread of letters. He himself and his brother and his
son—into whose hands he placed affairs of state after the conquest
—wrote a number of books whose titles are sufficient to indicate their
character. Here are some of them: “The Book manifesting the Path
of Righteousness and Unrighteousness,” “The Book for the saving of
the People of the Time and the Teaching of the Ignorant to
understand the Knowledge of the Word,” “Explanation to the Rulers
as regards their Duties and what is due from them in the execution of
their Duties,” “The Book expressing the Difference between Right
and Wrong,” “The Book the Window for Students in the holding of
the Doors of the Faith in God the Giver,” “The Book to prevent others
from following the promptings of the Devil,” “The Book plainly
showing that the love of the World is the cause of every Fault.” A
reflection by the way. When the Fulani reformers were composing
these works, and for many years afterwards, European and
American slavers were periodically visiting the lower Niger, six
hundred miles south, and, by presents of guns and powder,
hounding on the natives to raid one another for the benefit of the
Western plantations!
Othman’s converts were by no means limited to men of his own
race, as was subsequently shown in the adherents he obtained. But
it was not unnatural that such a man should have been an offence to
many; that his converts should have been molested; and that finally,
by his personal action in releasing a number of them from bondage,
a collision with the authorities should have been precipitated, which
eventually led to the proclamation of a holy war. Othman engaged in
the struggle with the words: “If I fight this battle that I may become
greater than my fellows, may the unbelievers wipe us from the land.”
Upon its successful termination, the statesman and the warrior
became once more the social reformer. Othman returned to his
preaching and to the compilation of his books.
A consideration of these facts irresistibly suggests that the root
causes of the Fulani outburst were spiritual in their nature. Othman
led a moral and spiritual revival, among a people who, like all
negroes and negroids, are naturally more accessible to spiritual
influences than are the white peoples of the earth. He gave a
renewed inspiration to letters. That the country, after half a century,
fell back once more into political chaos does not in the least weaken
the moral to be gleaned from these events. The religious revival has
not gone back. From that political chaos the country has been
rescued by the British power. One of the obvious duties of the
Administration is to continue the work of the great Fulani reformer in
everywhere extending and broadening the intellectual horizon, and
doing nothing to weaken the national spiritual influences, of the
people of the land. The creation of a system of education which shall
be truly national is imperative at this moment when the whole fabric
of native society is being shaken by disturbing elements. The field is
clear: the slate clean. We are here unfettered by those bitter
experiences of the West Coast of Africa and of India which are
perpetual reminders of past blunders and daily handicaps to true
progress.
 CHAPTER XIV
A SCHEME OF NATIONAL EDUCATION

The predominant characteristic of our educational methods—

official and unofficial—in Western Africa hitherto may be summed up
in one word—denationalization. The result is so notoriously
unsatisfactory as to need no specific illustration. If readers of Mr.
Valentine Chirol’s book on India will turn to his chapters on the failure
of our educational methods there, and substitute West Africa for
India, they will be furnished with a replica of the situation on the
West Coast of Africa. It is not an exact replica—for the reason that
while the ties of caste in India are a deterrent to denationalization,
such deterrent is non-existent in West Africa. But there is not one
charge which Mr. Chirol brings against the Indian system that could
not be equally brought against the West African system, and
identical consequences are ensuing. We are barely beginning to
realize that the policy, or rather impolicy, of the last half-century has
been a hideous example of misdirected effort, and there is hardly an
administrator who does not contemplate the development of the
“educated native problem” with the gravest foreboding.
The object of the Northern Nigeria Administration is to set on foot
an educational system throughout the country which shall save the
Protectorate from these follies, while at the same time affording the
rising generation the intellectual pabulum we are bound to provide,
and ultimately laying the basis for a native civil service. At the
present moment the scheme is only in its infancy, but the infant is
robust and full of promise. It is at Nassarawa, a beautifully situated
and healthy spot a few miles outside Kano, close by the Emir’s
country residence, that the first Government schools have been
started. They consist at present of the Mallamai school, or school for
teachers, a school for the sons of Chiefs, an elementary vernacular
school and a technical school with carpenters’, blacksmiths’, leather-
workers’, and agricultural classes. The creation of a primary and
secondary school will follow as soon as the work is sufficiently
advanced. Special importance attaches to the elementary schools,